Breakfast - The Most Important Meal Of The Year

As November surrenders to December and the first frosts give us an indication of what meteorologists are saying might be another incredibly cold winter, I realised I am close to celebrating the first anniversary of this blog. I’m pleased to say that in around ten months it has attracted over 10k readers and even managed to keep some of those readers coming back for more. I was reminded of this particular anniversary by the fact that I wanted to blog about the breakfast meetings I do and remembered I’ve already done it, thus showing two truths: namely, the cyclical nature of the universe and the inevitability of a blogger re-treading old ground.

Not one of these.

For the uninitiated the breakfasts are not early morning meals, but meetings at all sorts of times that I arrange with the different teams across the organisation. The teams are asked to get together before the meeting and draw a picture which they then present to me, in the location of their choosing. The picture is supposed to give me a snap shot of where that team is and what they’re facing at that moment. I’m a very visual person and consequently being able to put up the teams’ pictures on the wall of my office gives me a quick visual reminder of the issues they raised. It allows me to see the health of the organisation in a unique way. It’s also preferable to a picture from Ikea, especially as hammering a picture hook into a glass wall isn’t advisable.

There’s a team-building element to the idea of drawing a picture, in that it’s quite good fun and it encourages everyone to think about how to present the information. It’s not like you can just reel off a standard spiel about what’s happening, you have to think anew about the answer to “where are you and your team at this point in time?” which encourages a more honest, more immediate answer. It also allows people to go wild with their creativity and I’m pleased to say that THT seems to have some hugely creative people – one of the teams eschewed the idea of a simple picture in favour of a 10 minute video which they wrote, directed and acted in!

One of the other aspects that I really like about the breakfasts is that the team themselves choose the location of the meeting. Consequently, in the past month I’ve been to Barton Aerodrome, to the Sharron Church in Old Trafford, resplendent in its yellow paint, to the top floor of Stretford House, Circle Court, Vine Court, Millom Court, Buildbase and our offices in Altrincham, Stretford and Old Trafford. Not only is it refreshing to get out and inspect the various locations where our staff do their work, but it’s important as it takes me out of my comfort zone and puts the teams in charge – they set the scene, literally, and it’s up to me to do as I’m told, that’s a very healthy role reversal for everyone involved.

Once again the breakfasts highlighted a range of issues. Some serious which will take thought, planning and even courage to change; others were the sort of things that you might normally dismiss as smaller issues, but having been told them by staff first hand, it’s easy to see that the reason that these issues (technology, uniforms, equipment) are annoying for them – is because they prevent them from doing their jobs, not because they are simply looking for things to complain about. If my staff are telling me they’re being held back, then my primary responsibility is doing everything I can to remove those barriers.

Fortunately, the feedback also contained lots of positive things, stories about excellent performances, excitement about where we’re going and a feeling that maybe, just maybe, our ambition to be a force for good for our customers is being achieved. And it's as well that our staff are out there, in our neighbourhoods, doing their work day in day out. We can't stop benefit changes starting to bite, unemployment rising generally, youth unemployment hitting a record high for a generation, or councils cutting services and consulting on even larger cuts to Supporting People budgets. But through what we do we will continue to help people manage the implications of the literal and metaphorical icy wind that may well be about to blow through their lives.

Back To Basics (AKA The Importance Of Trousers)

The all-important trousers

With all the fuss and furore around benefit changes, planning policy and new funding mechanisms for building much-needed affordable homes, it's easy to forget that for our tenants, it's the basics of our current service that really matter. However, when you add in concerns about plunging stock markets, stressed banks, a double-dip recession and public service cuts - you can see why organisational attention can easily drift away from the things that matter.

Last night, at the end of a process that's involved large numbers of our tenants, my board signed off our 2011 Annual Report to tenants. Now we've had another busy year and a report on everything we've done would have stretched the attention span of the most diligent reader; so we asked our tenants what they thought we should cover - and loud and clear came back the message that they wanted to know how we were doing on the basics.

So this year our report concentrates on our repairs service, the way we clean up in our common areas, the way we cut (and now collect) our grass, the safety, security and reassurance given by our sheltered scheme managers, our 24/7 TrustCall service giving help and reassurance to the most vulnerable in the borough, the way we answer phones, our success in collecting rent and of course about our response to ASB. It's these services and products that are key to the happiness of our customers.

When it goes out to tenants in around a week's time I hope that our readers feel we've reported accurately on our performance on these basic services - what we've done to improve and what our plans are for next year. I also hope they take a moment to reflect on the dedicated front-line staff – our caretakers, plumbers, joiners, gardeners, care staff, and phone answerers – who day in day out, make their service what it is.

As it happens, I've just started on my round of “breakfasts” (which I've talked about before) and over the next six weeks I will meet with all our front-line staff and hear first hand from them what I can do to make their jobs easier and more rewarding. I love these breakfasts as it's a real chance to check the health of the organisation. I also get a sense of achievement from the stories people tell me and some surprises about the things that matter to them. We meet in work teams – generally small groups of seven to 15 and yesterday's meeting was with seven of our TrustCall staff, and I was duly surprised. Before the meeting, I'd never have thought that one of the things that would make the biggest difference to what they do would be cargo-pant style trousers rather than suit-style ones!

This morning, I'm off to meet our Social Enterprise Team – lads straight out of prison who we give six months' work to and then move into other jobs in our organisation, or with partners. It was one of those lads last year who gave me a real breakfast highlight, when he described his job with us as being his “light at the end of a dark tunnel.” Pretty humbling stuff and enough to make you realise that for this country, now, its another set of basics that really matters – a decent home, a job, and respect for one another.

The Importance Of Breakfast

When I was writing about my highlights of last year I mentioned that the breakfasts I had were a particular highlight. While you can’t help but agree with nutritionists that the meal itself is a valuable part of the day, I was actually referring to the breakfast meetings that I held with staff over the year. These meetings ended up shaping a huge part of my year and have started an annual trend that I intend to continue. To give you an idea of what a significant part they played here’s a photo of my office wall, which is covered in the drawings the staff did in preparation for the breakfast meetings. 

Earlier last year, the breakfast meetings didn’t require any kind of artwork at all. In the earlier incarnation of these breakfast meetings, every Tuesday morning I would get up extra early knowing that at 8.30 I was meeting a random selection of 10 or so staff. Those meetings were interesting in that we had a mix of staff – so it might be a support worker with a joiner and an accountant, and we’d get together and I’d listen to their concerns. Being honest, they were only partially successful. Some were positive, some were negative; some turned up, some didn’t; some revealed things that we could work on, some were like pulling teeth! On top of that although I don’t exactly get up late, the extra pressure to be in early made it all the more taxing.

So we took a Summer break, had a think about the format and completely changed them around. This time I had the meetings in teams, with no managers, just the workers. The rationale was that the organisation had been through a huge change and each different team had been affected in different ways. So what I asked the various teams to do before the meetings, was to draw me one picture that showed what it was like to be in Trafford Housing Trust, in that team, at that point in time. Over the course of a seven week period I threw my diary out of the window and met with 26 teams who presented and explained their pictures to me.

The result was those pictures you can see on the wall – and almost down to the last one they were fantastic. As a manager I was interested in the outcome of the picture and what it would show me needed to be done, but what I hadn’t appreciated was the sense of teamwork that would be built by asking a group of people to draw a picture. There were some incredibly detailed and clever pictures which had obviously taken a lot of thought – not only about what the issues were, but in how to present them. I’ll give you an example.

This one came from our Voids team – so all the plumbers, electrician and builders. They were doing this at the time of the Chilean miners rescue and in comparing themselves to the miners they were saying that they felt they had been by-passed by all of these things that had happened to the organisation. They were aware of them, but that somehow their experience of them had been at one step removed. Fortunately, their new manager, Stuart, was doing a fantastic job of pulling them up to “safety”. You can probably see how useful this picture is as an overview to give an instant impression about how the team felt and to show us what needed to be done.

I really had no idea that people would go for the idea as much as they did. I came away with a feeling that I knew the places in the organisation that were absolutely motoring and the are the ones that needed help. It was immediately before a strategy session with the board, so I got an overall sense of how prepared we were for the next step as an organisation. Some quite detailed points came out of the pictures that we’ve got to address before we start doing them again. After all, if we’re going to ask staff to tell us something, we need to be responsive to what they say. If they’re going to be open then we have to respond to that, and I guess that means some more early mornings and the occasional missed breakfast.